The other day, amongst the pages of MSN, I came across this article:

Earth is getting darker – and it’s very bad news

The researchers published their findings in the journal PNAS. I copy and paste the contents from the whole article and give my comments below (source of pictures: Getty).

Earth is spinning at around 1,040 miles per hour so if two points are equidistant from our equator, they should be equally warmed by the Sun. But that isn’t the case, and it could have significant consequences for our planet. A study looking at 24 years of Nasa satellite surveys found that the Earth is actually getting darker, and there are massive differences between the northern and southern hemispheres. So, what’s going on? A team of researchers used data from the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) satellite to find that the northern hemisphere (NH) is getting darker than the southern hemisphere (SH), and that it could be a big problem for our planet. The researchers, led by Dr Norman Loeb from the Langley Research Center in Virginia, revealed the NH experiences a net loss of radiative energy compared to the SH.

This means that the NH absorbs more light and therefore reflects less light, so if you were to look at the Earth from space, you would see that the NH would look dimmer as a result of this lack of reflection. [The authors claim that] This could affect our climate. The issue affects the amount of light the planet absorbs and re-emits into space as outgoing longwave radiation. Usually, this would be rectified by the oceanic currents that transport energy from the southern hemisphere to the NH but now the balance has changed so much that the ocean currents have not been making up the differences – for the last 20 year. The authors wrote: ‘The emerging darkening of the NH relative to the SH is associated with changes in hemispheric differences in aerosol–radiation interactions, surface albedo, and water vapor changes. How clouds respond to this hemispheric imbalance has important implications for future climate.’ The researchers explain that one of the drivers is albedo – the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface. As the arctic sea ice is rapidly melting, the Earth’s reflective surfaces, such as snow and ice, is being replaced with more light-absorbing surfaces like land and sea water. Another reflectivity source is clouds. And research has found that low-lying clouds have decreased in the recent decades, and this could partly be due to the fact that the NH is polluting less than it used to, as aerosols (the tiny particles that make various forms of air pollution) can act as seeds for cloud formation — fewer seeds means fewer clouds. The researchers said: ‘Since the NH darkening (relative to the SH) due to non-cloud property changes (aerosol–radiation interactions, surface albedo, water vapor) is not compensated by cloud changes, this suggests that there may be a limit to clouds’ role in maintaining hemispheric symmetry in albedo. The team also found that the NH is warming relative to the SH, and that the NH tropics are also getting wetter, suggesting a change in large-scale atmospheric circulation on the planet. The experts say that more research is needed but the NH could continue to warm more quickly than the south.

Comments by Henry Pool

Apart from some scary language and -pictures and the scary title trumpeted by the media, it seems to me the report is actually quite factual and correct on the findings of the research team. But surely these results were to be to be expected? See the summary of findings of results from the UAH (satellite) measurements below:

My own results of a statistical analysis of the daily data from 1974 to 2014 of 27 weather stations on the northern hemisphere (NH) and 27 weather stations in the southern hemisphere (SH), showed minima declining in the SH, by 0.14K/decade, whereas increasing by 0.24 K/decade in the NH. In fact, all my findings showed that the warming of earth is coming from the north and only very slowly wandering southwards.

An Inconvenient Truth | Bread on the water    

https://www.climategate.nl/2021/11/een-ongemakkelijke-waarheid-2/

Please take some time to read the above report. The results of my investigations confirm exactly the findings that earth in the northern hemisphere is ‘getting warmer’ = darker.

But that brings us back to the conclusion of my report. Namely that, in a vessel, carbon dioxide behaves like an ideal gas. So it diffuses up in the air in all directions and therefore the rate of increase in concentration in the air is more or less the same everywhere on earth. So the warming by it, if there is any, must then also be the same everywhere. So I wrote:

‘Clearly, the heat that warms the earth is coming from the north and is slowly spreading south. Since the extra carbon dioxide that came into the atmosphere since the 1970’s is uniformly spread across the globe, the observed temperature trends indicate that global warming due to carbon dioxide was not the dominant factor over the last 50 years. It appears that the warming observed in the northern hemisphere is dominated by other factors. These factors need to be identified and resolved before any kind of accurate future climate predictions can be made.

In my honest opinion, predictions made assuming that global warming due to carbon dioxide is dominant, are likely to fail.”